It happened to me, it happened to people I know, and it is the single most reported problem from new arrivals. So I started writing the failures down. There are currently 62 of them on the site I maintain, and payment ones are the biggest cluster. Here are the six that come up most often, in the order you should check them.

1. Your own bank is blocking it (most common by far) Symptom: the card binds fine, or appears to bind, then fails at the moment you actually pay. Sometimes it fails during binding instead.

The Chinese app is usually not the thing rejecting you. Automated fraud models flag a sudden charge from a country you have never transacted in, and block it. The wording you get back is misleading:

Payment failed / 交易失败 Transaction declined by issuer / 发卡行已拒绝 Security block / 安全拦截 None of those tell you "your bank did this." They read like the merchant failed.

Fix: call your bank, or use its app, and authorise international transactions from China. Then retry immediately. This resolves it for most people, and it costs nothing.

If you want the block lifted for the whole trip rather than one charge, the phrasing of that call matters — some issuers need a travel notice, others need per-charge approval. That difference is worth knowing before you are standing at a counter.

1. The card network is the problem, not the balance Visa and Mastercard have the widest acceptance. American Express, Discover and JCB are accepted by far fewer merchants — including merchants that clearly display the network logo.

This one is nasty because it fails intermittently. It works at the hotel, fails at the noodle shop, works at the mall. Nothing about your account changed; the merchant's acquirer changed.

Fix: carry a Visa or Mastercard as your primary. Do not make Amex your only card in China.

1. Name on card vs. name in the app Real-name verification compares the name you registered with the name on your passport. If you registered with a shortened name, a middle name in a different position, or a transliteration that does not match the machine-readable zone on your passport, verification fails silently and your spending ceiling stays very low.

Fix: use the exact form your passport uses, including the order. Do not "fix" it to look more natural in English.

1. You never finished passport verification Until verification completes, the amount you can spend is capped very low. After it completes, it is much higher. New arrivals often assume they have a working payment method because the first small payment goes through — then hit the ceiling on the first real purchase.

Fix: finish verification before you fly, not at the airport.

I deliberately do not publish the exact limits. Every number I found online disagreed with the next one — ¥6,000 here, $5,000 there, ¥35,000 somewhere else — and most of them were copied from each other years apart. The only source that cannot be stale is the limit shown inside your own app. Check that instead.

1. It is the terminal, not your account Small stalls, some ticket windows and shops outside the big cities cannot take a foreign-card payment at all, or their scanner simply fails on a foreign card. This is the most common "why won't it work" moment, and it is genuinely not your card's fault.

Fix: if a payment is declined, try the other app before you panic. Alipay and WeChat Pay do not share a failure surface. If both fail, pay cash and move on.

Which brings up the point people resist: carry a few hundred yuan in cash anyway. Mobile payment coverage is extraordinary in China and still not total. Cash is not a fallback from 2015; it is the thing that works when the scanner does not.

1. The SMS code never arrives Registration and high-value payments often need a code sent to your phone. Roaming SIMs, and some carrier routing, drop these. The code silently times out and you are left thinking the app is broken.

Fix: register with a number you can reliably receive SMS on while in China. Test it with a low-value payment while you still have hotel Wi-Fi and time to spare.

The diagnostic order that actually saves time Most guides list these as equals. They are not. When something fails, run this order:

Call your bank. It is the highest-probability cause and the only one that takes ten minutes to rule out permanently. Try the other app. Rules out the merchant terminal in one tap. Pay cash. Ends the interaction. Only if all three fail do you have an actual account problem — and at that point it is usually the name/verification mismatch in #3.

Why I wrote 62 of these down Because none of these failures are hard. Every one has a fix that takes under fifteen minutes. What makes them expensive is that they happen out of order and without warning, usually while you are tired, in transit, and unable to read the error message.

That is also why generic "how to pay in China" guides do not help much: they describe the happy path, and the happy path works. It is the other six paths that cost you an afternoon.

I keep the full catalogue — all 62 cases, grouped by payment, transport, accommodation, food, medical and emergency, each with the exact error text you will see and the first thing to try — at chinaunstuck.com.

If you have hit a failure mode that is not in there, I want to know. The list only gets better with real reports.